Olympic Reflections

There's no way I can finish my sweater in five hours given that I really need to finish work first. I made great progress in both areas yesterday, regaining all the ground I'd frogged and knitting past that point, but even knitting until 1:30am, I'm still a good two to three hours away from finishing the first sweater and another 9 to 10 hours away from finishing the second sweater.

The fact is though that I've learned a few important things over the last two weeks.

The first is that we've turned a corner my family and I. Even a year ago it would have been unthinkable for me to attempt to finish one child's sweater, much less two. I didn't have time for anything. If I wasn't working for pay I was working on getting us moved. The year before that I was just slowly starting to find time for myself again with two two-year-olds and a 7-yr-old. I hadn't knit since the twins were a few weeks old.

Breaking ties with my longest-running client who had always been my most time consuming and disfunctional client--but had in the few years finally become so much so that it was interfering in my ability to get anything else done--has left me feeling a bit odd. Shouldn't work be harder than this? I mean, I'm in the middle of a huge project but sometimes I even get to take the weekend off! That never used to happen. (It didn't happen this week, but that has more to do with the cold I've been fighting than the work.)

There's no denying the fact that I had a little time to knit almost every day for the last two weeks and some nights I got to sit with my husband and watch grainy television of the olympics for a few hours at a stretch while I worked. It felt so deliciously normal. Something we've put off until we had more time and less stress for so long now.

The sweaters are turning out well. There's plenty of room in the shoulders in the bigger sizes. The annoying yarn is fantastic once knitted up. The long skeins of yarn which are so flippin' annoying when you're knitting because no matter how careful you are the last few feet tangle mean that there are only a half-dozen or so ends to weave in. I found some pretty blue buttons to finish them with. I might get them both finished by tomorrow night--or maybe not till Wednesday. But soon. I clearly have more time to knit that I thought I did.

When I'm done with the current round of child and baby sweaters, I need to take a week or two to plan out this spring's garden. I haven't done nearly enough yet. But it's nice to know that with a little effort I can finish a sweater before the child has had a chance to outgrow it. Yeah, me! I'll post pictures soon of the finished sweaters.